I Fagiolini to bring 'emotional power of harmony' to the Lammermuir Festival
Acclaimed vocal ensemble I Fagiolini will take up a four-day residency at this year’s Lammermuir Festival, offering opera, a mighty choral masterpiece, several other vocal works and even a discussion. David Kettle talks to the group’s founding director Robert Hollingworth about what’s in store
“When you hear music, you mostly just hear a lot of noise, don’t you? Unless you know the music really well, of course. So our job is to make the music’s intentions and process as clear as possible.” It’s a disarming but typically frank summing-up of our sometimes tricky relationship with unfamiliar music from Robert Hollingworth, founding director of pioneering vocal group I Fagiolini. Together, Hollingworth and his singers have been delving into choral music both ancient and modern – much of it deeply unfamiliar to listeners, hence his intent – for almost four decades now. And they’ve found a whole panoply of new, creative, sometimes quirky ways to do it – from theatrical concerts to concept films.
Hollingworth and I Fagiolini take up a four-event residency at this year’s Lammermuir Festival, offering opera, a mighty choral masterpiece, several other vocal works and even a discussion over the space of just four days (“Why do we sign up to these schedules?” Hollingworth chuckles).
It marks the group’s Lammermuir debut. Festival co-artistic director James Waters, however, was keen for them to visit East Lothian: “I think the proof of the pudding is that Robert gets intense loyalty from his singers. It’s a lot to do with the fact that they do really interesting projects, but it’s also because he’s just a really nice guy with great ideas.”
I Fagiolini’s performances form part of a particularly broad and ambitious programme this year, with some real coups for the festival, including visits from exceptional French pianist Jean-Efflam Bavouzet, fiery Concerto Italiano with director Rinaldo Alessandrini, and the Philharmonia Orchestra.
But back to I Fagiolini, whose residency will surely be a highlight of the festival’s opening days. Much of what they’re bringing revolves around a composer Hollingworth clearly adores: Claudio Monteverdi. “It was about 50 years ago that I heard my first Monteverdi Vespers,” he says. “I must have been nine or ten, a chorister in Hereford Cathedral, and we were singing some of the sections of the piece. But when I heard the rest of it, I thought: hang on, what’s this? It’s quite extraordinary.”
But what makes it so extraordinary? Monteverdi is hardly an unknown name, but there might still be trepidation about exploring music created a century or so before the composer who seems grand-daddy of them all: JS Bach. “I think Monteverdi is very strongly aware of the emotional power of harmony,” Hollingworth argues. “He sets up things that you expect to be delivered, then holds them back – it’s sometimes like a kind of written-out jazz. It’s hugely expressive, and the thing is, anyone can listen to it. Someone once told me that they may not know much about how music works, but they know the real thing when the hear it.”
Hollingworth and I Fagiolini have two big Monteverdi concerts, covering the rich devotional settings of the 1610 Vespers and the far earthier, more human concerns of some of the composer’s madrigals. But, explains Hollingworth, Monteverdi’s sacred and secular musics are more similar than you might think. “The language is pretty much the same,” he says. “In fact, in 1606-7 he reworked his fourth book of madrigals – some of which are quite erotic – as sacred pieces, just putting sacred words to them. He worked with a priest in Milan on it, and they had no qualms about doing it. To us, it might feel extraordinary, but it isn’t really if you think about the intensity of Catholic religious passion at the time.”
Coming closer to home – and, perhaps, into more familiar repertoire – I Fagiolini’s operatic offering is Purcell’s iconic classical tragedy Dido and Aeneas. “But as much fun as that will be,” Hollingworth smiles, “it’s almost the first half of the concert which is more interesting, because we’re going to be singing about seven or eight Purcell pieces that are absolute treasures. I spent a year and a half of my life just before the pandemic going through every single piece that Purcell wrote, and this little collection is what I think are the very finest bits.”
I Fagiolini are renowned for their sense of theatricality – no doubt put to good effect in Purcell’s opera – but elsewhere, Hollingworth explains, they’ll be letting the music speak for itself. “If you’re going to be theatrical, you need a good reason – if it gets in the way of the music, you’re doing the music a disservice.” It all goes back to clarity, he explains – in terms of ensuring that audiences understand and feel connected with music that’s possibly unfamiliar to them, and probably written centuries earlier. “I always think of my mother – she’d be in the audience, and she’d have no specific knowledge of the music. So I’d always think to myself: how is she going to understand this music? How can I help her?”
It's perhaps hardly surprising that Hollingworth is pursuing his passions in I Fagiolini’s Lammermuir Festival concerts. “Co-artistic director Hugh MacDonald and I have this terribly naive theory,” Waters explains. “Don’t mess about with artists’ programmes if they’re really serious. They know what they perform best – let them do it. You don’t need to have all the ideas yourself as artistic director – you need to know how those ideas fit together, but they don’t all have to come from you.”
This sense of freedom and a focus on artists’ individual strengths is particularly evident in 2025’s programme. British cellist Laura van der Heijden, for example, appears several times across the festival’s 12 days as a concerto soloist and a chamber musician, while Dutch pianist Hannes Minaar devotes two late-night concerts to Shostakovich’s 24 Preludes and Fugues - his own suggestion. One unnamed artist with a particularly challenging programme even queried the wisdom of pressing ahead with it, Waters confides. “They said: if we do that, will we sell any seats? I just sent a note back saying: well, what are festivals for?”
It’s a strong position for the Lammermuir Festival to be in at its 16th outing, and having developed trust among its participating musicians and audiences, Waters and MacDonald are able to take risks. But despite all the warm feelings of nurturing a network of artists who can do their own thing, the festival is clearly far more analytical and hard-headed about its audiences, where they’re coming from, and how to attract even more people.
“We know we have about five or six different audiences,” explains Waters. “A lot of people go to everything, but many don’t, and we try to cover those audiences’ tastes.”
He also draws attention to growing international interest in the event. “I’ve had a couple of emails from the USA saying they couldn’t come this year, so could we let them know our 2026 dates? We’d love to increase our international reach – partly because it’s good for our artists, but also because it does a really good job for the county. I do profoundly believe that top-line culture helps the people who live in the county, and also brings economic benefits to the area.”
So at its 16th outing, the Lammermuir Festival is a complex mix of deep creativity and canny expertise - and that mixture is clearly working, judging by the richness of this September’s programme. There’s even a repeat of last year’s young people’s initiative – Front Row – giving up-front seats as well as offering valuable internships to youngsters.
“If we thought we’d be where we are now when we launched in 2010, we’d have burst out laughing,” admits Waters. “But I think we can say we’re now one of the UK’s major classical music festivals. We’ve sort of come up quietly on the rails, but now I think there’s virtually no classical artist we wouldn’t pick up the phone to.”
The Lammermuir Festival takes place in venues across East Lothian from 4 to 15 September, see www.lammermuirfestival.co.uk. This feature was produced in association with the Lammermuir Festival
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